Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

“Okay, fine. I raised it with him, like your pal heard. Trust me on this, though, Ern: no author wants to hear every conversation their team has about them. I tell you what you need to know.”

I deflated. “Do you even care about my career?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, you seemed awfully chummy with McTavish and Wyatt this morning. After the review went up.”

Simone finished her drink and looked around the bar. Given the dawn start and the blackness outside, it was easy to think it was later than it was. Harriet and Jasper were having a drink in a booth opposite us. The president of the Mongrels, Brooke, was reading in the far corner. The only part of McTavish that had changed in the last hour was, repeatedly, the angle of his elbow. The three older women, two of whom had shared dessert with Juliette and me, were acting like it was a bachelorette party, sloshing drinks. Each had a copy of the same book out on the table, as if it were a book club, although the title wasn’t by any of the festival guests: The Eleven Orgasms of Deborah Winstock by Erica Mathison.

I knew that book. It had been a viral phenomenon. Too much sex to be mainstream, not enough to be considered outright pornographic, tittered about in enough salons and high teas to have sold well into the millions. If the established writers hated me, they’d surely despise Erica Mathison. The book had taken off on TikTok, which was both a social media app and the sound people like Royce must hear when new writers find new audiences in new mediums. The one I hadn’t met, hair twisted up in a silver beehive, was showing off her signed copy (To V!) with gold-bangles-jangling glee. It had the logo for Gemini Publishing on the spine and a sticker on the front from a Darwin bookshop—I knew the logo because I’d gone in there to shuffle my books to the front of the shelves, only to find none.

McTavish drew my attention with a thump of his cane. He slid off the seat and propped himself into a standing position. “Right! Off ter bed with this one.” He thumbed at his own chest as he called across the bar to Cynthia. A guest took the opportunity to dart up and cut him off, a copy of The Night Comes folded open, pen at the ready. I thought Brooke might follow suit, but Jasper was next to join the mini-queue. He didn’t have a book on him, so when it was his turn he stuck out a hand too early and then had to walk several steps with it out like a ship’s rudder until it landed awkwardly in front of McTavish’s belt.

“Jasper,” Jasper said.

McTavish gave him a murmured hello, but Jasper’s hand remained unshook.

Jasper coughed lightly. “Jasper Murdoch.”

“Yeah. All right. Hang on,” McTavish said. He fished a pen from his coat pocket and then took a cardboard beer coaster from the bar, scribbled on it and handed it to Jasper. “There you go.”

Jasper stood there a second, flipping the coaster over in his hand, then made his way back to his table and handed the coaster to his wife as he took a seat and a long sip of his drink. He looked like someone who’s just crossed the schoolyard to ask out a crush and depleted all their reserves of shame and energy simultaneously.

“To Jasper Murdoch,” Harriet read out from the coaster, then put it in her handbag. “Wow. That’s a keeper.”

McTavish ambled down the corridor toward the restaurant and his cabin further up the train, the heavy thump of his cane carrying through the thin floor with each step.

“Okay,” Simone said, after McTavish was out of sight and the rhythmic clunk of his cane was fading away. She spoke firmly, with a hiss, but in more of an I’m going to tell you something you need to hear tone than an admonishment. “Just so you know, we’re a partnership. You don’t get to tell me what to do. We’re supposed to trust each other.”

“I was just—”

She held up a finger. “I’m not finished. I know you’re upset. I get it. But I don’t need you involving yourself with McTavish, okay? I heard there’s a bit of tension between Wyatt and Henry. They’ve been in business directly for a long time—Wyatt snapped him up before any agent even got a sniff, and he still doesn’t have one. So friction between a certain author and a certain publisher might lead to opportunities for someone like me to work with someone like our Scottish friend. No offense, but I don’t come on a trip like this to watch the panels. If I get Henry on board, it increases the profile of my business. It increases your profile, by virtue of being a part of my business, like it does all my authors. And that’s when backs get scratched, and how someone like you might wind up with a blurb.”

“You’re trying to sign McTavish?” I thought aloud. “And of course Wyatt would hate that, because he’s probably got the Morbund books tied to a shit deal for McTavish. Or you could threaten to take him somewhere else, I suppose.”